“We started looking for Italian craft beer and started noticing a little bit here and there, more and more showing up,” Vismara said. “We were talking about this and one day I woke up, called Brian and said, ‘We should write a book about the Italian craft beer scene.’”

The money raised from Kickstarter[11] will pay for their second trip to Italy. The two traveled there in January, spending 11 days interviewing a gamut of brewery owners and beer aficionados.

Jansing, who is also a writer, grew up in Italy. The idea for the book stems from a recent trip where he visited some of the bars in Rome and discovered a vast array of craft beers.

“There were so many different beers, it just blew me away,” Jansing said. “But it was very familiar to me. … It looked like Denver in ’96.”

The 1990s, he said, was a time when the craft beer scene was beginning to blossom in the U.S. There were a handful of microbreweries breaking through, creating a foundation for the market, leading to an explosion of new businesses. In Italy, five foundational breweries helped pave way for the growth of about 20 in 2001 to nearly 500 today.

“Those foundational breweries … that story mirrors the American story,” Vismara said. “You had people who traveled or brought some interesting beers back to them and they tried it and they realized that beer didn’t need to be the mass-produced, industrial lager.”

Italy’s lack of craft beer history has helped spawn a wide variety of experimenting with recipes, he said.

“A lot of brewers said they were blessed without a beer scene,” Vismara said. “They had a blank canvas and they could brew whatever they wanted and the local culture didn’t have any expectations … so they went from zero to crazy in five years, 10 years.”